Cheating involves an act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, imposture, or imposition. Such actions are often used to create an unfair advantage over another, and may be done for the cheater's own selfish interest. While many people consider cheating to be a violation of a mutually agreed upon rule, boundary, agreement, or the like, there are sometimes areas where at least some people may perceive cheating to be, to some extent, acceptable. Other people may find, however, cheating to be unacceptable in virtually any situation.
One such area in which cheating may be found is in computer video games. In some situations, cheating allows a player to complete a game at an accelerated speed. This may be desirable, for example, to a casual player that would prefer to use the game as a temporary diversion rather than to spend hours to complete the game. For single-player games, such cheating might be considered, by some, as less offensive. However, in online games involving several players, cheating is more often considered to be unacceptable. Such cheating in online multi-player games, gives the cheater an unfair advantage over the other players. Therefore, in some online game arenas, cheating is not only prohibited, but, should a player be caught cheating, they may be banned from the game. Other actions might also be taken. This may especially be true in gaming arenas that provide a reward, such as money, acknowledgements, or the like, to a winner.
Cheating methods used in video games vary greatly. For example, a cheater might employ cheat codes which are often sequences of inputs, such as button presses, textual commands, or the like, that enable a cheater to activate features of the game to the provide an advantage to the cheater. Another method used by some cheaters is to modify existing game code. Such code modification might involve analyzing portions of the video game binary code, and changing the binary code, changing game data, or the like, towards the advantage of the cheater. Another cheat method, known as game training, modifies a behavior of the game, by freezing a memory address, disallowing the game from changing information stored at that memory address. This enables the cheater to manipulate the data in the memory address to suit the cheater's desire. Cheat methods also may involve modifying other sections of the game once it is loaded into memory for game play.
While some game developers, tournament sponsors, and even other game players, have attempted to develop various approaches to detecting cheaters, because cheaters often vary their methods for cheating, many such approaches have been less than successful. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.